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Gil's Spiritual Journey: Q&A

Introduction

So, good evening, everyone. Is this volume okay for everyone? This is good. I didn't know I was supposed to be here today. Somehow the scheduling happened in such a way that I didn't know it so much, and then I see, like, somebody texted me 20 minutes ago and said that. Then I looked at the schedule, and sure enough, there I am. [Laughter]

So I'm happy to be here, but I think that we're going to have to do this together. I don't have a talk to give, not anything that maybe you want to hear at the moment.

There are a few things we could do. The classic thing is you could ask questions. I was home with my wife just now and I said, "Oh, there's no one to be there and I'm scheduled to be there, what do I do?" And she said, "Well, you can just go do questions." And I said, "Okay, I'll go." We could do that, or I could ask you questions, but that might be scary. So what would you like to do? Those are the two options I can think of.

Questions? Okay, let's see if you have any questions and I'll do my best to respond or ask a question in return. Maybe we can pass out the mic.

The Role of Fun

Questioner: I'm very new to all of this, but one question lately has been, what is the role of fun? Having fun, just fun, pleasure. How do we work that into improving?

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, that's a good question. Some people find this practice to be quite fun, believe it or not. I don't think I associate it with fun, but the greatest happiness, the greatest joy that I've ever had in life in a long, sustained way is through this practice. I've been on retreat for months and it was kind of like non-stop joy, just kind of ecstasy. So was that fun? I don't know if that's exactly fun, but it was a kind of unsurpassable joy that was wonderful. So that can happen that way.

This morning I had a conversation with someone about grief in this practice. In Buddhism, is there a place for grief? Because in the ancient texts it seems like there's no real place for grief; grief is something to overcome, and there's no mention of fun. There's a little bit of mention of play, but there's not much on fun either. And so does that mean that this is a really flat tradition, and the only thing you're allowed to do is sit and close your eyes and be quiet, and just deal with it? Or is there fun? Is there grief? What is the range of things a human person can do?

Now I'm speaking for myself rather than for Buddhism. I'm not looking to Buddhism to tell me how I'm supposed to be. I'm looking at Buddhism to inspire me to look deeply at what is happening to me. So if I am having fun, I don't have any idea that a Buddhist should or should not have fun; I'm just having fun. And then the practice of mindfulness is for me to look at that as I'm doing it. Are there ways in which I'm attached to some things, or ways in which something unwholesome or unhealthy is coming out in that fun? If it is, then I'd like to stop that. But if it's not, then I'd like to keep doing it. I don't see any reason not to. Fun is fun.

The same thing with grief. If I feel grief, I don't really care whether the ancient tradition has no room for grief—that you're supposed to just overcome it and not have it. It's a complicated question what the ancient tradition really says and what it means. Scholars are looking into this to try to tease it apart, because we're talking about a language that no one speaks anymore from 2,500 years ago, and to understand exactly where these crucial questions are played out is a big topic. But I'm not so interested, even with grief or anger or anything, to judge it automatically as "I should or shouldn't be that way."

If I'm having it, then it's real. And if it's real, I want to see it, I want to know it more deeply. I want to see what's going on and I want to see if there's something unwholesome or unhealthy in the way that I'm engaged in it. Am I attached, am I clinging to something? If I'm clinging to something, then for me, I'd rather not. But if I'm not clinging, whether it's fun or grief or whatever it might be, if I'm not causing any harm to myself or others, then I'm fine with it.

So that's not answering your question directly, but it's offering you a Buddhist principle, which is: be mindful when you're having fun and see what it's like. See what's going on. It is probably not a satisfying answer, but maybe you want to say why you're asking?

Questioner: I think at the center of it is that question of "I should or shouldn't," and behavior based off of "let me have this clear cut, I should do this or I should do that." But I think your answer to me kind of says that there isn't a this or that, that it's an investigation of each thing. It's just that mindfulness approach of when I recognize what I'm calling fun, what's there? Is there attachment? Is this a behavior that is moving towards what I want to be, or is it behavior that's moving towards something else?

Gil Fronsdal: Yes, so I think you understood what I had to say. Shoulds and shouldn'ts are not as interesting as looking deeply. If you look deeply, then maybe you have an answer to whether you should or shouldn't. If you see that it's causing harm to you, maybe then you shouldn't do it. Or if it's causing harm to others, maybe you shouldn't do it. But you don't start with that premise; you start with investigation.

Phases of the Spiritual Journey

Questioner (Theresa): Hi, I'm Theresa. I've been on a journey. I have been meditating for maybe three years now, but I notice there have been phases in my psychology. Kind of observing myself and seeing how I react to things. I was curious, in your journey in this practice of mindfulness, have you been through a similar journey of the evolution of your psyche? Going from observing my tendencies, to watching myself in action, and trying to observe those actions. I noticed I've been shifting in my perception, and then it influences my actions. For somebody who's been practicing for longer and deeper, was there a progression or some sort of phases of observation? Where did you end up? When you practice, do you just kind of go back to center, and do you feel like you're going to different states of consciousness where samadhi^[1] is a huge thing? How has that evolved?

Gil Fronsdal: Wonderful. I love the metaphor of journeying, the unfolding, the evolution of practice. I find that the stories people tell or the teachings that lay out an arc of practice are inspiring to me. Yes, I've had all kinds of journeys, arcs, and phases in my practice. I probably wouldn't have worded it the way you worded yours, but that's always going to be personal. I was delighted to hear the things you were mentioning. I can affirm for you that yes, there are phases, and what you describe are good phases to go through.

There's a lot more. There are some that are more classic for Buddhism, and some which are very personal and aren't really classically discussed. But one of the interesting things about the shifts over time that makes an interesting study is: how do your interests shift over time? How do your perceptions shift over time? How does what you tend to notice in yourself and the environment shift? How does your motivation shift? These will all unfold and change, sometimes intentionally—like this is what we want to see change, and we move towards it—and sometimes it's a surprise how we change. But if you do this practice, you will change.

Theresa: I guess I was curious if there were very striking arcs. Where did it take you on your journey and how did that help you evolve?

Gil Fronsdal: I've been doing this for almost 50 years, so there's a lot I could cover, and it's still unfolding. When I was a beginner, I was introduced to meditation. It wasn't Buddhist meditation, but it was nice to do. Then I was in college, I had summer vacation, and I stopped meditating. About nine months later, I was introduced to Buddhist meditation through Zen meditation. I wasn't just really caught by the meditation, but I was interested in the teachings that I read about.

I got serious about doing it, and I was ready to really give myself over to Zen practice, but I didn't feel like it was the right phase in my life to do that in a big way. I felt like I had to take care of loose ends. I was 20 or 21, and one of the loose ends was that I'm from Norway. I didn't grow up a lot in Norway, but I had this uncertain relationship with it. So I thought I needed to go back and resolve my relationship with the country and where I should live. I went back to Norway for a year, and eventually came back to the United States to continue college.

I was suffering, and I had this idea that if I started Zen meditation it would help me deal with the suffering. So I started meditating every day, twice a day. Something shifted for me after a few months. I discovered I was meditating for no reason. I'm kind of a rational guy, so it was strange for me to not have a reason to do what I did, but I was going to do it anyway. There was something in me that was motivated, but I didn't know why.

I thought about it for a while and I realized two things were happening to me. One was that I wasn't doing meditation for a reason, any more than a musician plays music for a reason, or a dancer dances, or an artist paints. It's an expression in the moment. You don't do it to get through the music as fast as you can; it's to express something. It was the fullest kind of self-expression I knew, and that was so meaningful for me. As that became clear, I felt what I was experiencing was integrity. Not moral or ethical integrity, but a sense of wholeness I was developing that I hadn't had before.

That sense of wholeness changed the trajectory of my life. First I had it in meditation, and then I discovered that the line between meditation and daily life is an arbitrary line. Why do you only be this way in meditation? I wanted to be able to do this wholeness in the rest of my life as well. So I moved to live at the San Francisco Zen Center.

In this quest to be more integrated with this wholeness, I paradoxically kept going deeper and deeper into the monastic life with more meditation. It wasn't exactly that I wanted to meditate more, I just wanted to somehow expand my life. But in the process of all that, there were all these phases. I began seeing my psychology, my neuroses, the social games I played. The oddities and foibles of my mind became more obvious.

I was motivated to work with them. In the monastery, one of the things I saw painfully was how much I wanted people to like me. I was doing social gymnastics to get everyone to like me. I was the manager of the kitchen, managing a kitchen crew, and that's the last place you want to be if you need to have people like you. It was really hard and exhausting. One of the ways wisdom works is if you do something long enough to see the suffering of it. I saw the suffering of wanting people to like me and how it was overrated.

Because I was meditating a lot, it was a very interesting juxtaposition. Between seeing the suffering of this psychological complex of wanting people to like me and feeling I was ready to let go of it, I'd go and meditate. In meditation, I'd have this feeling of wholeness, goodness, and a deep, satisfying feeling of just being alive. Going back and forth between that radical alternative and whatever conditioning I had growing up, something was changing and shifting for me.

Theresa: Yes, very much. Thank you so much.

Gil Fronsdal: It's definitely a good journey and a wonderful thing to go through. There are phases. It's one of the greatest things in my life to have done this practice. Where it's taken me, brought me, and the things I've discovered—it's been the greatest thing.

From Zen to Vipassana

Questioner: So this is kind of a segue. I happened to be listening to a Dharma talk that Norman Fischer^[2] gave at Green Gulch today while I was walking my dog, and he started talking about you. He was saying that you received Dharma transmission^[3] in Zen, but now you're a Vipassana^[4] teacher. As someone who has a foot in both camps myself, I'm curious about what made you ultimately make this commitment to be a Vipassana teacher rather than a Zen teacher.

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, because of all your students! Clearly, all the people who came to practice and wanted to get Vipassana teachings from me were such sincere practitioners. It was so clear how good it was to be there, that had a lot to do with it.

I came to Stanford in 1990 and I was also being trained to be a Vipassana teacher then. I was still doing Zen training, and there was a small sitting group in Palo Alto. I was asked to take it over and be a teacher for it. That group grew and grew. My plan was to grow it big enough so that I could invite another teacher and I could leave. I wanted to live in the country someplace. But I've been out here 32 years, so I haven't left yet. At some point, it became clear that I wasn't going anywhere because I felt a commitment to the people who were here and practicing.

We had a meeting where I wanted them to know that I was making a commitment to be a teacher for the group, without any expectations. The meeting quickly unfolded to, "We should get a center." So then we started this process to buy this place, which took about five years.

But to answer your question about the Zen and Vipassana thing... Norman Fischer has a dual allegiance too, you know. He's deeply immersed in Judaism. His best friend until he died was a rabbi. This idea of being in two traditions has lots of room in Buddhism.

In the early years, I didn't make a definitive decision. I loved Zen, had no trouble with it, and felt very at home in it. I was ordained as a Zen priest. But back in the 1980s, there was a whole slew of Buddhist teachers who had ethical challenges, and the Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center was one of those. When that happened, it kind of freed me up from Zen Center, and I went to Japan to practice.

While I was in Japan, I knew I had to leave after some months to get a new visa. I discovered that for $25 more than a round-trip ticket from San Francisco to Japan, I could get a round-trip ticket to Bangkok with free stopovers in Japan. So I flew to Bangkok. I was a Zen priest then and I was beginning to have conversations with people who had meditation experiences I hadn't had. I felt I needed to know the map of practice. I knew that in Thailand the map of practice was much more clearly laid out than they ever do in Zen.

I went to a little meditation monastery on the edges of Bangkok. The teacher put me in a little hut to do sitting and walking meditation all day. I was waiting for the visa to come, and it took me 10 weeks to realize the visa wasn't coming. Those 10 weeks were like a 10-week retreat. I'd never sat in silence that long, and I got more concentrated than I'd ever been before. I touched something inside that I'd never touched before, and it became essential to touch that again. When I left, there was a kind of dark night of the soul. I went back to the United States, but all I could think about was going back, because I didn't know anywhere else to touch that place again except through that practice.

I worked at a fast-food restaurant to earn the money, and then went back. This time I knew the meditation practice I had studied in Thailand came from Burma, so I decided to go to the source. That next retreat was eight months long, and it made a huge impact on me—a life-changing event.

When I was on that eight-month retreat, I got really, really quiet and deep. But I would still have these little thoughts about Zen Center—positions in Zen Center, advancement, teachers, Zen Center intrigue. I said, "Gil, how in the world did Zen Center get into the depth of your psyche?" I made a vow not to go back to Zen Center until I got it out of my mind.

I came back to the US and wasn't planning to be back at Zen Center, but I had a girlfriend with psychological challenges who really wanted to live there, so I went back to live with her. I stayed for another year and a half. Then I was ready to go back and continue with Vipassana practice. I went to a three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, but by that time they wanted me to come be a shuso^[5], the head monk at Tassajara^[6]. I didn't have a career or ambitions; I just wanted to practice. So I was delighted to go back and be the head monk.

After 10 years of intensive monastic practice, it felt like enough. I decided to get a master's in religious studies specializing in Buddhism so that I could teach an intro class to Buddhism at a community college. While I was there, Jack Kornfield^[7] called me up and invited me into his teacher training. Of course I said yes to study with Jack. I came back to the Bay Area, living at Zen Center and studying with Jack. I was always in and out; it wasn't like I chose one or the other.

I started studying to get Dharma transmission from Mel Weitzman^[8], my Zen teacher. He knew I was being trained to be a Vipassana teacher. He gave me Dharma transmission and said, "I'm giving this to you with no expectation. You have this other path, and I trust what you're doing. Do what you see fit."

Being outside of Zen Center, they didn't really invite me back to teach much, but the Vipassana world invited me to do a lot of teaching. I studied the early teachings of the Buddha and felt a strong affinity to them. Right now, I feel a stronger affinity to these early teachings than I do to Zen teachings. I say to people that in a way, Zen is my religion, and Theravada^[9] or Vipassana is my practice. I'm not very interested in religion; I'm interested in the practice. But I love Zen, I'm very grateful for it, and I stay connected to the San Francisco Zen Center. If they ask me for something, I try to say yes.

Swimming and Meditation

Questioner: You said you went swimming earlier. What's your relationship and connection to swimming and meditation? What do you see in the overlaps of those?

Gil Fronsdal: I know there are swimmers who feel like they meditate, get concentrated, and get absorbed right there with the swimming. I'm not a swimmer like that. I just swim because I enjoy it and I like the exercise. A year and a half ago I got cataract surgery, so for the first time in 50 years, I can see when I'm in the water. It's wonderful to swim in this outdoor lake up here. I look around at the trees, the green herons, and the ducks. When I do breaststroke I look around; with my crawl, I don't look. I just swim.

With this mindfulness practice, I've done it so long that it's second nature for me. No matter what I'm doing, I'm attentive to what's happening with me, but I'm not using swimming as a means of concentration or getting quiet. Those are all great states, but the point is not to suffer. It's to have some feeling of freedom as a thread that goes through everything we do. One of the primary practices I do—whatever I'm doing, including swimming—could be summarized by a simple question: am I suffering?

If I am, then I stop, take a good look at that, and practice with it. But if I'm not suffering, if I'm having fun, I'll just continue doing what I'm doing. And I think swimming is fun.

Setting Intentions in Practice

Sveta (reading from chat): We have a question from Robin: Could you speak about setting intentions at the start of your meditation practice?

Gil Fronsdal: Some people find it tremendously helpful to be conscious about the intentions that you live by. One of the things I learned from Zen practice is to investigate and consider your deepest intention. What's the deepest intention you want to live your life by? Don't take your life for granted. Reflect on what the deepest heart wish is, or the deepest thing you want to do.

Why not follow your deepest intention? Are you scared? Do you have some kind of ambition or greed for something else? I think it's one of the greatest resources we have, and I trust it very much. I kept asking questions: "What is in there? Is there something deeper than that?" I spent a whole year asking that question every day, and it was phenomenally useful.

As we get in touch with intentions that are important for us, it's interesting at the beginning of meditation to remind oneself of that intention and make that the context for why you're practicing. The deepest intention could be reached through becoming more concentrated, mindful, or clear. Setting an intention at the beginning of a meditation is like setting a direction for yourself. The way I found it most useful is to set the intention at the beginning and then don't think about it again.

It sets the mood and the general container for what we're doing. Rather than going along merrily with whatever motivations you're living your day by, there's a much bigger shift to really be here intentionally to practice. It also works a little bit like when some people go to sleep at night, tell themselves, "I'm going to wake up at 5:00 a.m.," and without an alarm clock, they wake up at 5:00 a.m. Setting an intention going to sleep can survive and live offline in the subconscious while we're sleeping. Setting an intention in meditation can be the same thing. You set the direction, the course you're going, and then you don't think about it anymore, trusting that something has been set in place in the deep, conscious parts of the mind. Sometimes you'll be surprised by how it is there to support you, guide you, or open new things up.

It's a wonderful thing to practice with intention, but you don't want to get busy with it. Don't have too high expectations of what it can do for you, but it's a wonderful thing to do.

Conclusion

So it's just about nine o'clock, so thank you. Thank you for accommodating me not coming with a talk, this is probably nicer. It was nice for me. Thank you for coming.

We're going to probably change the protocol for the sittings here on Monday. It'll be posted, or you'll probably get an email. You'll be notified about the change, it'll be easier to come, and we probably will stop doing the sign-ups. So it'll change, and it'll stay that way when we get to July. Thank you very much.